


Shelter in Place

by noun



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Fuck Or Die, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Pre-Season Six Finale, Xeno, stranded on an alien planet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 17:51:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16202588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: “It is,” and he says a word that sounds Galra, all harsh edges and unfamiliar vowels, but it doesn’t translate directly, and Pidge never did well at even German, so. “The time when Galra choose a mate, and fight for them if need be.”That sounds a lot like Pon farr.“What happens if you don’t find a mate?”Lotor folds his arms.“You die.”It is absolutely Pon farr.





	Shelter in Place

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first panel I've missed at NYCC and I'm sad.
> 
> Set during season six, if season six was stretched out like taffy into a few years.

Of the two of them, Lotor is the pilot, so Pidge can’t be blamed when the ship crashes over the planet they were surveying, brought down by an anti-aircraft system belonging to the ancient Altean outpost they were supposed to investigate. 

Lotor is a _good_ pilot, so even though the landing is rough, they come down in one piece, and the ship’s mostly undamaged— minus the fact that one of the wings is currently fifty yards away, smoking slightly.

They take stock of their supplies. 

Lotor has a paranoid streak that becomes apparent once he’s not able to hide it in aloofness; his ship has been stocked to last at least the equivalent of an Earth year of full rations for one person. 

Though again, that paranoia—she doesn’t think he’d consider splitting it if it weren’t a short-term survival situation where there might not be enough to last. The water filtration system is fine, too, though that would be more of a concern if they hadn’t landed on a planet with breathable atmosphere that seems mostly Earth-y, if decidedly more oxygen heavy. So they won’t starve, and they have enough to drink, and the scant living quarters on the ship are honestly kind of luxurious in comparison to the Garrison's.

It could be much, much worse.

The trees are skyscraper-huge where they grow, though Lotor brought them down next to what Pidge is going to call a ‘river’ for lack of a better word to describe the vastness of it. The trees stop maybe three hundred yards from the banks. One was toppled by Lotor’s ship and now the immense top sits half in the water and half out. She’s not a biologist, but she thinks vaguely about ecosystems and life cycles as she stares at it, waiting for Lotor to come back out of the ship with whatever conclusion he’s drawn. She’d already done her part—the emergency beacon is working. Lotor had objected to just sending a distress call off into space where anyone could hear it, so she’d fixed it to only ping the Lions or the castle-ship if it came into range, but that required them _to_ come into range.

She’ll give him a few days before he decides to allow her to widen the list of potential rescuers.

Pidge hears the hatch hiss and open, and Lotor steps out to join her. She’s not a mechanic in the way they need a mechanic right now, and Lotor is possessive over his ship and whatever tech he used to build it to the degree that she’s content to wait for him to _ask_ for help rather than offer it and be treated to the cold shoulder. As it is, they’re the only two sentient things on this planet, and while she’s not big on conversation, it’s going to get pretty boring pretty fast without that much to do. They’re even too far from the Altean outpost to go poking around in it.

“Any bites?” she asks, mostly for the pleasure of hearing him say, “No.”

The truth is, she doesn’t trust him. It doesn’t matter how much Allura does, or how Shiro continues to insist on the use of him as a means to an end. Maybe it’s the part of her brain that sees the teeth and the claws and reacts, well, _reasonably_. He’s a predator, half-Altean or no, and she doesn’t need political savvy beyond what she has to know that to keep his Empire he needs quintessence. The last place she needs her suspicions confirmed is a place where they're alone but for one another.

But knowing what motivates someone and discerning what they’re willing to do to get it are completely different things.

“They know what quadrant we’re in,” Pidge says, still speaking in the direction of the river. “And it took us two days to get here. So assuming they scan each system for the Altean signature, or Allura does her thing to find us—two more days to realize we’re missing—it’ll be maybe a week,” she says, and then when she turns to look at his questioning face, “—eight quintents. Approximately.”

Lotor says, “That is far too long.” 

Maybe she’s imagining grit teeth.

Pidge shrugs in response, folding her arms, which the gauntlets of her suit always make difficult.

“You could let me widen the distress call range,” Pidge tests. “We might be found in the next few days if someone hears our signal.”

He stiffens. She definitely did not imagine that, even as he self-corrects, the tightening of his shoulders no more than a flicker.

“Consider the value of a capture of a pilot of Voltron and the Galra Emperor, both in monetary and the damage to our reputation,” which, alright, he’s got a point. He’s now looking at her, rather than the river, and she turns to face him—look up at him, actually. “No. We wait. I have matters to attend to in five quintents. With any luck, we will be located before then.”

“Emperor stuff?” Pidge asks and unfolds her arms. There’s no way he said that without _realizing_ it begs follow up questions.

His lip curls. “No,” he says, and turns to go fuss over his prized ship some more, like he’d be able to undo the damage with sheer willpower.

Pidge kicks at a stone. Eight days isn’t that long. Maybe the ship has some sort of entertainment module.

 

* * *

It doesn’t.

She has pong installed on her suit’s system and a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that Matt had given her when they met up again, though she didn’t know _how_ he’d managed to get a copy of the text file. She appreciates the irony.

Water, check. Food, check. Shelter, check—and what more is there to worry about? Nothing better to do than sit around waiting, which has eaten up four days and even Pidge’s reserves of patience. The megaflora means there ought to be megafauna, she remembers that much from her mother’s lessons and her early, standard-issue kindergarten obsession with dinosaurs, but nothing’s come out of the forest to try and eat them. She’s seen what passes for herbivores here, something like a deer peeking out of the woods once or twice and there’s definitely a sloth-analogue in the higher branches of those immense trees. 

Maybe they’re the top of the food chain. 

Maybe Pidge and Lotor are.

Four days (or what this planet’s days are) of nothing but walks to the river and back to stretch her legs and draw out her book as long as possible, with the very interesting Galra computer systems right there, and Lotor effectively forbidding her to use them, for security or privacy or the fact that he’s probably using them, shuttered up in there pretty much since they crashed.

If they had to worry about conserving fuel—they don’t, thanks quintessence!—she’d make more of a fuss about it, but she only neatly categorizes this behavior into the ‘Lotor likes control’ bucket and the ‘Lotor is an ass’ bucket, right next to the ‘issues orders to Shiro’ entries in both buckets.

Alright, breathe. She has three days until theoretical, mathematically-likely rescue, until the rest of the paladins come to pick them up. Pidge closes down her reading file and goes back over to the ship. It’s not hot—Lotor’s not making her suffer by more or less keeping her stuck outside during the daylight hours—but she’s bored, and the river is one, by no means fast-flowing and two, cool without being cold. Maybe she can wash out the whatever-Alteans-call-a-bra that Allura gave her and underwear too. She’s got extra; they knew this was going to be at least an overnight, but laundry seems exciting in comparison to sitting.

She bangs her still flightsuited hand against the side of the ship.

“Hey,” she says, “Do you have a towel?”

No answer. She’s willing to excuse a delay, enough time for him to extract himself from whatever he’s working on, come over to the airtight door, and key the code to open it. Then she’ll repeat her question, and he’ll give her a _look_ before he throws her something that’ll get the job done, if only to keep her from dripping on the floor when she comes in tonight.

The private quarters on the ship are nice, being that this was more-or-less a luxury ship (for a prince) with an absurd amount of modification. But besides the high-quality construction, the nice bedding, and the clearly not standard issue rations they’d been living on, the ship was spartan without too many personal touches. That had meant that when Lotor had ceded use of the ‘bedroom’ to her and kept the captain’s chair for his own rest, there hadn’t been much to clear out. His uniforms were still in here, though he’d allowed her what amounted to a drawer. She’d used it for an extra black undersuit, three changes of underwear, and toiletries because oh, guess what, the ship had a bathroom, too, more or less a twin to those on the castle-ship.  Even stranded on an alien planet, she didn’t have to deal with the fuzzy taste of morning mouth.

Pidge wonders if half his disdain for them wasn’t based in the fact that they were all born planetside and raised unaccustomed to the sterility and efficiency of spaceships.

She knocks again, harder this time, her bare knuckles against metal. Nothing. She counted out a reasonable pause, and then raised her hand again, just in time for the door to open, absent the pneumonic hiss of equalizing pressure. Lotor stands there, arms folded. 

Irritation is usually beyond his emotional range with any of them.

“Do you have a towel?” she repeats, assuming that upbeat and feigned ignorance of his displeasure will shame him out of it. “I want to go for a swim. It’s hot.”

His eyes narrow. “A swim?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s what you do in water to not drown.”

He clearly doesn’t appreciate her excellent sense of humor, though he refocuses on her original question without her needing to hold his hand and lead him back to it, which she appreciates.

“No,” he says, which is fair, she hasn’t seen one on board.

“Okay,” she says. “Guess I’ll just wait outside until I’m dry.”

She expects him to retreat back inside the ship and get back to doing whatever he’s been occupying his time with, leaving her back out here and bored, bored, bored, but Lotor _lingers_ , arms still folded, like he gave her something to respond to and now she’s making him wait.

She takes advantage of it.

“You’re not bored?” she asks. “Stuck in there—alone.”

“I am trying to get us rescued,” he says, accusatory, a brief heightening of his reactions beyond the baseline disdain. His arms even uncross. “Something which _you_ have declined to help me with.”

“Because you won’t let me touch anything on your ship,” Pidge shoots back, holding her ground figuratively and literally. “You’ve more or less kicked me out. At least you haven’t made me sleep out here. And what’s so important that you had to be back within five quintents? Can the Galra really not even last five whole days without you there?”

“ _No_ ,” Lotor says, and he does step forward, though not out of the ship. His armor makes him look bigger, though he’s willowy in comparison to other Galra, like the ones in the Blade of Marmora. Still, he’s much taller than her. “Surely even you can understand how unstable it is now, given that my absence will be noticed during—”

He catches himself, and Pidge actually thinks it’s genuine, not just a hook to make her prod, her curiosity riled up.

But he steps back and closes the door with one last irritated look at her before he’s gone.

Pidge sighs and goes to scout the river for a good place to swim.

* * *

 

It takes him until there’s only a few hours of light from the planet’s single sun left before he comes back out. Pidge had found a good flat rock to dry herself and her suit on. It lay flat and bare like the skin of some animal brought back from the hunt, stiff from the water. Lotor actually steps out of the ship to come talk to her, though he leaves a dozen paces between himself and where she pulls herself into sitting. The sports bra and bike short-type things she had on under wouldn’t be enough to cut the chill of the evening once the sun went down; she’s grateful in her own way that he’s going to let her back inside for the night.

But she’d prefer to have the dignity attached to wearing at least a part of her paladin armor during this conversation, and so before he starts to speak, still weighing out the etiquette between them, Pidge swipes it off the ground next to her and shakes it out, putting it on one leg at a time. He stares at her like she’s the alien.

“Why did you run off?” she asks, supposing there’s nowhere for this conversation to go but there, honestly.

“I did not ‘run off’,” he says, and _good_.

“You locked yourself in the ship,” she says, shimming the arms into place and zipping herself up. Hunk usually helps her, but she manages well by herself. “That’s like running away, when neither of us can really leave.”

His lip twitches.

“I know you don’t like being stuck here, with me,” Pidge selflessly gives him, “But I’m not the worst possible person to be here with you. We’re allies, remember?”

“The Galra Empire is allied with Voltron,” he corrects, and oh, that’s the difference he wants to mark.

“Why would anyone notice that you were missing? What do you have to get back to?” she presses, again.

Lotor exhales sharply in rebuke.

“Do you truly not understand?”

“Nope,” Pidge says, popping the p, rocked back onto her heels. 

Dismissive, Lotor turns his cheek. “I should have expected so much.”

“From a group of kids who were shot into space a few years ago and told to save the universe? Probably,” she admits. “We didn’t believe in aliens until we met you guys. Not multi-celled ones, anyway.”

If Lotor were a different man, maybe he would have laughed. But he is what he is, and he doesn’t crack a smile. Her sympathy for whatever it is falls on deaf ears, and she’s getting tired of it.

“It is,” and he says a word that sounds Galra, all harsh edges and unfamiliar vowels, but it doesn’t translate directly, and Pidge never did well at even German, so. “The time when Galra choose a mate, and fight for them if need be.”

That sounds a lot like Pon farr. 

“What happens if you don’t find a mate?”

Lotor folds his arms.

“You die.” 

It is absolutely Pon farr.

“Really?” Pidge asks.

“If you are subjugated in combat, the urge is saited as well.” 

Unhelpful, given that Pidge is approximately two-thirds his size, and he killed Zarkon.

“Can we have this conversation inside?” she asks instead, and after a moment of stillness, Lotor nods, and steps to the side to allow her past him and back to the ship. He tags behind the entire way.

Then:

“I would greatly appreciate your assistance,” he says, and Pidge knows she heard him correctly, even ground out between grit teeth.

“What happens if I say no?” she asks before anything else, hedging her bets. Planning for the worst-case scenario is always a good idea—she won’t call it paranoia, for fear of having anything in common with Lotor, but it’s always good to have a way out, in code or when you’re infiltrating a ship or discussing engaging in Pon farr.

“I have sedatives. I will arrange to dose myself with enough of them to induce a coma, and buy us perhaps another five quintents.” 

“Will that stop the dying part?”

Now, he smiles, with too many teeth for her liking.

“It will delay it, but at a cost.”

She doesn’t need the details.

“And if I agree?”

“Three quintents, and my solemn word that none of the paladins need know what happened.”

Three quintents placed them within the rescue window, but only if you were generous in assuming the luck of their rescuers. Five was smack dab in the middle of the probability hump, and she was struggling to imagine a Lotor less kindly inclined toward indulging them because she’d cost him whatever delaying it would. 

And the other paladins?

Lance, if he found out about the reproductive habits of the Galra, would make several crass jokes, and more when he realized how much it would bother Lotor, especially if he felt insecure about Allura. 

She didn’t need to model individual reactions to the knowledge to know how poorly it would go. One was enough.

Lotor gives her the space to think. He holds his ground, but he doesn’t watch her the entire time, instead focusing on the wall behind her. 

“Ok,” she says. “But there’s something you should know. I haven’t had sex with anyone yet. I’m a virgin.”

“A virgin,” he says, and she expects another disdainful half-lecture on Galra society once she knows the confusion doesn’t stem from a mistranslation, but before he can begin she raises her hands, preempting him, six fingers extended.

“Shiro and Keith,” she says, and that takes one hand out once she pairs those fingers together. “Since before we left Earth, I think, there’s a prize if anyone asks them but no one’s wanted to try.” She shrugs. “Lance and Allura, _obviously_ ,” and something flickers behind his eyes when she says that; she ignores it. “Hunk has a girlfriend on a planet we freed.”

One finger left standing. “And that leaves Coran, and I’m pretty happy pretending he doesn’t have genitals, so please don’t ask about it.”

Lotor definitely was forced to think about it, by the brief but wonderful repulsion on his face. The disgust cuts through the strain, the shock draining some of the high color from his cheeks, and for one moment he looks normal and like he’s always looked, impenetrable and imperial. Zarkon’s son. Pidge has no desire to know about his private weaknesses; this vulnerability that runs through him like a flaw through a diamond. It takes a lot to fight this hard to seem effortless and in control.  While she dislikes him for his haughtiness and cold strategy that runs so efficiently as to be cruel, she doesn’t want him humiliated.

And she thinks he’d interpret pity or even sympathy as humiliation.

“So,” she says, a grand conclusion. “A virgin. I was pretty young when we left, and even though I’m older now, I haven’t gotten the chance.” She wrinkles her nose. “All of the aliens we’ve met so far are kinda— _alien_.”

Tentacles instead of limbs or too many eyes. Pidge doesn’t struggle with seeing them as people, just as viable sexual partners. Bilateral symmetry is preferable to radial.

“And,” Pidge adds, deciding she’s not finished, not defending her choices. “There’s also the saving the universe part of Voltron. We’ve been busy. _You’ve_ been busy.”

“I,” Lotor says, “was a prince of an empire that spanned several galaxies. Arrangements were made for these circumstances when they occured.”

He’d made them for this time around—his _appointment_ —but then they’d gotten stuck here.

“But they’re no longer an option,” he dismisses. “So we will make do.”

 

* * *

 

 

He tells what she needs to know once they move to the sleeping area of the ship. Pidge recalls Dayak teaching Hunk, and honestly would have rather had her explain all this, crop smacking against palm, than hear Lotor rattle off phrases that translated poorly, like ‘ _scent marking_ ’ and ‘ _evolutionary advantage_ ’.

She takes her glasses off, folding them and tucking them out of the way on a shelf over the bed. Sitting with her back against the wall on the bed isn’t exactly appealing, so she scoots down, lays flat. The Galra apparently don’t believe in concept of pillows, leaving her level. She should really do something with her hands, but she can’t think of what. Folding them on her stomach would just make her look like a corpse.

She turns her head to look at Lotor, who watches her for long enough that she thinks he’s going to say something, some criticism or comment, but he only looks away to get to taking off his armour, a pneumatic hiss signaling the slide of a panel away to reveal a mannequin. 

He sheds his armour like it hurts him, little catches on side-seams popping open to allow him to divest himself of the chestplate, the pauldrons, the boots. He ends up stripped down to an undersuit not dissimilar to hers, which he peels himself out of.

If not for the fact that she knew he was half-Altean, there’s nothing on his bare body to indicate it. She looks at his crotch because she’s entitled to it, at the bare and hairlessly smooth spot that’s only a touch darker than the rest of the purple of his skin. As she looks up, she catalogues all the other differences, like a good biologist’s daughter. No navel, his ribcage is odd, possibly because he has fewer, but hey, the Galra (or maybe that’s the Altean, because Allura _definitely_ has them too) apparently are mammalian enough to have nipples. 

When she reaches his face, he’s looking at her too, and displeased or not with her examination, he’s breathing harder now, even as he comes to the bed to mount it. Immediately, he’s on his hands and knees and above her. 

He looms over her, his hands flat on the bed bracketing her shoulders, and Pidge thinks of pillbugs and armadillos and curling up to protect the vulnerable parts of yourself, but does not flinch.

“Has it started?” she asks. His hair is Altean-absurd, great wafting clouds of it that fall around his face and frame it. Pidge keeps hers utilitarian short and misses the length she had when she was still just Katie. 

“Somewhat,” Lotor says, watching her, like he’s willing the seconds down before he’ll have the excuse of instinct to lose himself, and Pidge reaches up to touch the strands that have slipped forward over his shoulder. Her forearm brushes against his, and Lotor’s attention is drawn from her face to where she twists a lock between thumb and forefinger before tucking it back behind his ear. Her wrist brushes against his cheek and he closes his eyes, turns his head enough to press against the thin skin over her pulse and inhale, nostrils flaring. His tongue dips from between his lips to lick a thick swath up to the center of her palm. Something rumbles inside his chest, and it spooks her, still holding his hair, which she yanks by accident. He jumps, eyes opening and the rumble cuts off.

Pidge is left deer-in-headlights, a knee drawn up against her chest in defence, like she could kick him off if she needed to.

Lotor shakes his head, which doesn’t clear the color off his cheeks, and looks at the spot next to her. “It’s started,” he says, then, “Put your leg down.”

Except that he does it for her. His clawed hand closes on just below her knee, and he doesn’t so much unfold her leg as he does put it to the side. And then it’s not to so much looming as him suddenly much, much closer, his hips lowered to hers as he rests in between her legs. 

“Um,” she says, to his face which is inches to hers. It’s a lot, him on top of her and demanding all of her attention.

“A moment,” Lotor says, brow furrowed like he’s straining. 

Something wet and slick tickles against her skin, probes between her lips. It’s more sinuous than a finger, and thicker, and she squirms, pressed down too much by his bulk to really move. It’s his dick, but the alien equivalent of one. 

“Um,” she says again, and she can feel her cheeks burning.

“Stop moving,” he cuts back, “I can’t-”

The tip undulates, sliding through the cleave of her lips, the full textured length of it dragging against her clit, and Pidge inhales, sharp, body tensing for a second.

“Lower,” she says. 

He obliges, and she stays very, very still as he flows into her, an undulating length of flesh no wider than two fingers. The inclination to observe this impartially is strong, but she’s in her body, not drifting, and it makes her all too aware of some of the things she’d like to not be thinking of.

Like how wet it is.

The feeling of something inside her is just strange, not unpleasant, and she would prefer it if he maybe dragged it against her clit again. Lotor’s face is still tense but most of the wrinkled set to his brow has vanished.

“Is this it?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “You humans are so…”

She waits for him to spit it out. 

“ _Altean_ ,” he finishes, in a tone that puzzles her. 

Pidge isn’t sure where he got that information, or if it’s accurate, but she doesn’t think he wants a response.

He reaches down and pushes her thigh. It takes her a second, but she understands, and lifts it. His hand remains steady on her calf, supporting her legs. She thinks he’s going to start thrusting, but he doesn’t. The— his penis, she clarifies— withdraws, and Pidge frowns, but as it drags out of her, it doesn’t slither back into his body but sides out against her cunt. It tapers to a tip that she reasons, unseen, is approximately the width of a fingertip. That’s what probes at her clit again.

Whatever he’s coated in, it’s thick as honey but spreads easier, warm, and it makes the friction more languid, drawn out. Lotor watches her while he does it, feline eyes on hers while it the fine tip pushes back the hood of her clit and rolls against the heated bud, an undulation so wet she can feel the liquid dripping between her legs, wetting the fabric under her.

“Um,” Pidge says, articulate. 

“Doesn’t that feel nice?” Lotor says, and Pidge closes her teeth tight rather than hear her voice crack on whatever answer she’d give.

Lotor drops the hand holding her leg up, and she casts it over his hip instead, keeping her legs spread enough not to impede his access. He catches her arm by the wrist, and in a surge of movement pins it above her head. She can feel the underside of his claws rather than the tips themselves as his grip tightens and her fingers twitch, ineffective.

“Can— can you kiss me?” she asks, and he smiles like a cat that’s got the cream, or Pidge herself when she solves a problem worth her time. He’s heavy, and she can’t get a full breath in, dizzy. Lotor smiles, and she remembers just how many of his teeth are sharp when his lips meet hers and his tongue pushes into her mouth a lot like what’s going on down below.

He does seem to be amused by the bluntness of them, with the way he taps against them. He’s too aware of what he’s doing, moving his tongue in a way that matches his cock, and Pidge whines into his open mouth. 

She finds out really, really quickly that he likes it when she makes noise. He likes it when she trembles, when she bites down hard enough on his shoulder to draw blood, blood that wells blue to the surface and doesn’t have a hint of copper to the taste.

She watches his eyes progress from yellow with slit pupil to nearly blown full gold, luminous like nearly all the other Galra they see, and he stops talking. 

Time becomes something she’s less sure of the longer it goes on. Everything she could use to count it is arbitrary; when they switch positions because she cramps, when she comes, the twilight sleep she falls into from sheer exhaustion once is the only time he stops his relentless attention and curls against her. She doesn’t think he sleeps during it. She can feel his breath against her neck as she drops off, and it’s the same as when he awakes; hard but not frantic. 

They’re maybe a dobosh in when she needs her first bathroom break, and he lets her go only reluctantly, tracking her across the room, the absence only won by her promise not to be gone too long against the yellow glow of his eyes.

Looking at herself in the mirror is sobering. Her hair is a mess, her body covered in healing-over scratches and a particularly nasty bite by her shoulder. She uses the toilet and drinks from the faucet for lack of options before going back.

He lets her go more easily the next time she asks for it, and the next, and that proves more reliable than any other method of counting time. By what she thinks is the third dobash, he’s grown less frantic, and doesn’t raise his head from the bed when she tries to get off it, letting out a long exhale instead as she walks to the bathroom, her hand against the wall to hold her up.

Her knees tremble and her thighs ache, and were it not for her shoulder pressed against the wall of the shower cubicle, she’d fall. If she sits, Pidge knows she won’t get back up, not unless Lotor comes and finds her.

There’s something like soap in a gel form that dispenses from the wall, and she scrubs her hair with it, and her face. A warning in the back of her mind suggests that she might be washing the smell of him from her skin, that he might reject her when she comes back because of that, or presume it an offense. The bed had looked like a murder scene for something that bled purple. At first, Lotor’s failure to come had surprised her, but then she’d realized that the fluid probably was the Galra equivalent of semen.

And there’s a lot of it. Everywhere. Painted on her thighs and her stomach, under her nails, _everywhere_.

It washes off with the soap and scrubbing and reveals bruises underneath. She’s a mass of tenderness everywhere except between her legs, which edges more toward buzzing and oversensitized. Penetration hadn’t hurt, more odd than anything else, especially since he didn’t thrust, or Galra weren’t built to feel pleasure that way, or Alteans,

seeing Coran naked would answer this question, but she’s forgetting that she thought that thought,

and besides, she only wants to eat and maybe sleep to forget all the aches. She feels _good_ , content, feeding back into the sleepiness. 

She can’t fall asleep in the shower, she tells herself, blearily tilting her head up in the direction of the water in the hope that the water beating down on her face will do more to keep her aware. Pidge rolls the specs for the latest toy she’s prototyping through her head, working herself through the strain of unassisted math to knock her thoughts back into columned flow.

At the sound of the door to the bathroom opening, Pidge turns her head to watch through the shower door, obscured by steam. The figure is purple, which is all the confirmation she needs not to care, closing her eyes and exhaling as Lotor lets himself in. She’s pressed into a corner, and he takes advantage of the spray without so much as a sidelong glance at her, even though he’s boxed her in. Once more, the water runs transparent purple to the drain, growing more and more faint until it’s nothing at all, and Lotor dips his head to wet the great mass of it. 

When he flips it back, it’s with great effect, some of the droplets even hitting her skin, which she’d make more of a fuss about were she not wet. 

“Is it over?”

He glances over at her, finally, carelessly too.

“I believe so.”

Pidge nods, and closes her eyes. There’s nothing more expected of her, nothing to react to; she can rest.

At some point, Lotor turns off the water. As it turns out, he did have towels, the ass, because she’s wrapped in something warm and soft and set back down on the stripped bed, and the lights are low, and Pidge stops thinking.

An alarm jars her into wakefulness. 

Pidge edjects herself from bed, hands and knees on the cold floor of the dark ship, lit only by the flashing yellow lights. Where is her bayard, her Lion, where are the others?

She remembers where she is all at once, with the help of the bruises that the adrenaline renders as simply *there* rather than painful. Pidge turns her head to find Lotor, standing, dressed in his undersuit with his lips pursed.

She’s still naked; resents him, a little, for his readiness.

“Someone’s hailing us,” he says, steps over her in a long stride to reach the door to the main portion of the ship.

“It’s the others,” Pidge croaks, absolutely confident in this, even as she pulls herself to her knees and then stands. Her clothes are… somewhere.

When she puts them on and joins him, where he sits in the captain’s chair, fingers interlocked as he glances back at her before looking at the screen itself.

“Do you recognize the—” But she’s already at the keyboard, replying.

“Guys?” she calls out, and then there’s Allura’s voice, bright but concerned: “Pidge! Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” she says, relieved, then, quickly: “Lotor’s here too.”

(Policy isn’t exactly to hide anything from him, and something twists in her stomach, because she certainly won’t be telling them about this.)

“What happened?” Hunk cuts through, and Pidge explains, hurriedly laying out the planet’s ancient defense system, just in case they were speeding to the rescue, and then summarizing the last few days with brusque efficiency. Hunk slides in a few technical details, and between him and Shiro and Allura and Pidge herself, they hash out a retrieval plan.

They can be there soon.

“Oh, and, ah— is Lotor with you?” Allura edges out, and even though the feed is audio only, Pidge can imagine her expression, how purposeful it was to leave this as the final question.  

Pidge looks over her shoulder to see him lean forward, his fingers unlacing.

“I am,” he says. “Rest assured, Princess, I am as well as she proclaims me to be.”

“Oh!” Allura says again. “Good! We’ll be with you soon.”

“See you then,” Pidge says, and cuts the connection.

“So,” she says, to her accidental companion. “I guess we’re back to waiting.”

He makes a noise in agreement, and stands. “Get your things. We’ll wait for them outside.”

Pidge gathers what little she had brought. It fills all of a bag small enough to fling over her shoulder, and she suits up, glad for the hard shell of her armor. All the while, Lotor stays in the cockpit, doing whatever it is he does when he’s alone, and Pidge pays him no mind until he introduces himself into her space soon before the rest of the paladins are set to arrive.

“I’m done.” She stands and walks by him to get out, though he yields in turning to let her pass easily, and even follows her.

His own hands are empty when he exits the ship.

She feels the other paladins before she sees them, and then it’s four shapes in the sky, coming closer until she can pick them out by color rather than just as specks. 

All the Lions but her Green touch down, a wind whipping up as they do so, and Pidge feels an *ache* for her Lion, squeezing her bag to her chest. Beside her, Lotor lifts an arm, and taps something into his bracer. Lance is the first out of his Lion, and his smile as he yanks off his helmet and runs to meet her is cut short as he skids to a halt in time for Pidge to instinctively brace for the massive _bang_ behind her and the brief flash of heat.

He’s blown up his ship.

That gets the rest of the paladins out of their Lions, Keith with folded arms and Hunk open mouthed, but it’s Allura he addresses, and sweetly at that.

“I didn’t want to trouble you with salvaging it,” he says. 

Lance shakes it off before the others and walks right past him, to Pidge, who he throws an arm around and walks back to his Lion. His fingers are pressing on a bruise, but she doesn’t flinch. 

“You’re coming back with me,” he says. “I won the coinflip.”

She looks back at the smoldering heap and Lotor and Allura, going to meet him, and lingers rather than allow Lance to maneuver her any further. Lance only fights her a little on it, caught between getting her back to the safety of the Lions and waiting to hear what the girl he has a massive crush on says to Lotor.

“I’m happy the two of you got along well,” Allura says to him. Red’s jaw’s open, and Pidge picks her way inside.

“I’m unfamiliar with human society,” Lotor says, as the mouth closes and her view of him is reduced to an ever-shrinking fraction. “But given the similarities to Altean, the distance was easy to bridge.”


End file.
